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How to curb bureaucratic empire-building: Goar

Donald Savoie is making politicians and bureaucrats squirm with his latest book, Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher? It challenges the widely held belief that government should be run like a business.

The young Acadian came to Ottawa with impeccable credentials. He was fluently bilingual, had a doctorate from Oxford University and a passion for public service.

There was one problem. Donald Savoie didn’t seem to understand the bureaucratic culture. He went to his deputy minister early in his career and said he felt there were too many people in the department for the amount of work required.

“The reaction was swift,” Savoie recounts. “He proceeded to tell me that I was showing a disturbing level of disloyalty to the department. He pointed out that if I truly felt this way, I should seriously think about leaving.”

That might be one of the dumbest pieces of advice ever doled out by a senior government official.

Savoie did leave. He returned to his New Brunswick roots and became a professor at the Université de Moncton where he wrote more than 40 books about politics, public administration and the decline of democracy. He is now an internationally respected scholar with seven honorary degrees and an armload of awards, medals and prizes. He has advised prime ministers, premiers, corporate leaders, the UN and the World Bank.

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The government of Canada could have had all that talent — but drove Savoie out.

The Moncton author, now in his 66th year, is still making politicians and bureaucrats squirm. His latest book,Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher?, challenges the widely held belief that government should be run like a business.

(The title — likely to puzzle non-Maritimers — came from a conversation Savoie had with a leading Canadian businessman. The Nova Scotia-born magnate had grown up in a small village where the music teacher, a provincial employee, worked alongside the two-person bureau of the Department of Natural Resources. “Today we are told we can no longer afford a music teacher in our community,” the businessman said. “However, the Department of Natural Resources is now housed in two fine buildings employing 150 people.”)

To Savoie, this anecdote encapsulated what has happened to Canada’s public service over the past 30 years: front-line workers have been sacrificed to make way for offices full of paper-pushers, managers, supervisors and evaluators. “It is ill-conceived, costly and misguided.”

The bottom-line doctrine took hold under prime minister Brian Mulroney, who decided the public sector should operate with the same market discipline as private enterprise. His four successors have adhered to it slavishly.

It has never worked and it never will, Savoie says.

The first problem is that the public sector is not in the business of making money. In the absence of profit-loss statement, it has no way of measuring how well it is doing. So it fabricates yardsticks and backs them up with reams of reports showing how efficient, effective and indispensable it is.

The second problem is that government is incapable of “creative destruction,” the process by which industry gets rid of outmoded products and develops new ones. Bureaucrats don’t have the power to pull the plug and politicians seldom do it for fear of offending vested interests. “The problem is not that government is spending more on new things, but that it spends massively on old things.”

The closest the public sector comes to creative destruction is when the prime minister takes a good whack at the bureaucracy as Stephen Harper is doing now, Savoie says. But the wrong people get cut and the numbers soon creep back up. When Mulroney took office, 70 per cent of federal employees worked in the field delivering services: settling new immigrants, assisting laid-off workers, running airports, preventing pollution and making sure Canadians got their pensions, passports and baby bonuses. Today the proportion is 57 per cent — and shrinking.

The remedy is obvious, Savoie says with the same clear-sightedness that once scandalized his boss. Figure out what a government department is supposed to do, then fit the employment level to the workload.

Ottawa still won’t like it, but this time it comes from a man with a global reputation for smart public policy at a time when taxpayers want to know why they pay so many bureaucrats to provide such poor service.

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